FIRST-ANNUAL LIONS HEALTH FESTIVAL

Cannes Lions is the world's biggest celebration of creativity in communications. For 60 years it’s been home to the biggest ideas changing how brands interact with customers. This year, it turned its attention to health. 800 people from 50 countries gathered to share, judge and celebrate the life-changing creativity of the world’s best healthcare agencies. Inside, you’ll find a quick-scan summary of the conference’s content, including short stories, memorable quotes, great creative, and even a few share-worthy tweets.

Make things people want
Instead of making people want things
Duncan Arbour, inVentiv Europe
Created for an association of optometrists, Penny is the first bedtime story that also allows parents to tell whether their child has a vision issue as they read to them. This year alone, Penny is on track to test over half a million children.
Great example: Bronze-award-winner Penny the Pirate storytime eye test

Lift Labs: Empathy-driven design
Dr. John Redmond was inspired by his grandfather, a dentist whose career was cut short by tremors caused by Parkinson’s Disease. Anyone who uses their fine motor skills - to, say, put on makeup, design a layout, or lift a spoon of soup to your lips - can imagine what it’s like to lose that ability to control your hands.
30 million people in the U.S. and Europe live with essential tremor caused by Parkinson’s, traumatic brain energy, etc. It can be treated with medication, but those pills aren’t well tolerated because of side effects and the only other treatment is brain surgery.
65% of people with essential tremor no longer eat in restaurants because they literally shake their food off their utensils.
Lift Labs’ goal was to help those people regain their dignity and return to restaurants.

The shortlist campaigns inspiring me most are all 'things'. Beautiful or practical; all smart and life-changing #LionsHealth #inventivlions
Zoe Healey
@ZoeVH
Mother Book was designed to promote Kishokai's Bell-Net Obstetrics product to expectant mothers. A small bump inside book seems to physically grow as the mothers themselves grow and turn the pages. The campaign encourages mothers to write their personal feelings on the pages and consider the book a gift to their children.
Great example: Grand-Prix-winner, "Mother Book” by Dentsu Nagoya

Unilever: Social good = bottom line
The numbers are big. But they’re not enough.
Samir Singh, global brand vice president at Unilever, explained that 1.7 million children, a number equivalent to 20 jumbo jets full of children under the age of five crashing every day, die every year of these conditions. But, those numbers become statistics. Dr, Myriam Webster, global social mission director, Unilever, said “they remain numbers.” It’s stories that change minds.
They have both social and business goals.
For Unilever, the Lifebuoy brand and its good work aren’t about charity or one-off PR opportunities. They’re about changing behaviors to both do good for society and good for the company. Soap saves lives. Selling more soap builds bottom lines.
20 more children under the age of five have died because of diarrhea and pneumonia in the time it took you to watch that video

Unilever: Marketing that earns change
Unilever already supports the largest public hygiene campaign in the world. Their ambition is to reach 1 billion people.
To accomplish that, they focus in on connecting with mothers at times of high anxiety about hygiene. Times like back to school, change of seasons, and around festivals where people gather and congregate.
In one powerful example, they stamped 5 million roti with a soap washing reminder at Kumbh Mela 2013 in Allahabad, India, where a 100 million visitors pass through.

Stengel: Big shifts are changing our industry
Jim Stengel, CEO of the Jim Stengel Company and former P&G CMO, believes great work means having a big brand idea, creating a story and telling it, and being the kind of organization that has something to say.
1. Big Brand Ideas
A single idea people think about when they think about your brand, one that’s rooted in a universal truth, is authentic to the brand, and starts with a defined purpose.
2. Told in great stories
Share stories that are authentic and rewarding. Those can be stories that the brand tells or ones it’s audience does.
3. By energized teams
Jim believes talent and organizational energy are the new competitive advantage. Creating that starts with engaging everyone with a purpose.
Just 13% of employees around the world feel engaged at work today. That’s a huge gap because companies with higher engagement have 22% higher profitability. (Gallop)

Great example: Sanofi’s Connecting Nurses
Sanofi brought together 14 million nurses from over 130 countries to share their ideas on how to bridge the gaps in healthcare and resources that happen around the world.
Sanofi is extending the program to patient communities next.

Dr. Rita Charon is an expert on narrative health. That’s the art of storytelling and story listening to better comprehend the experiences of the sick and those who care for them. She’s also a doctor (internist) and a professor of clinical medicine. Rita believes her work requires creativity and writing. The creative act is not elective in healthcare.

Charon: Invite patients to tell stories
After she asks that question, she stops herself from asking or typing and just listens.
The first patient she did this with told her his grandfather died of kidney disease; his father died of kidney disease. And, that he was having problems with his son and was worried he might do something violent.
Then he started crying.
She asked him why he was crying. "No one ever let me do that before," he said.
Healthcare is a place where people can give accounts of self. There are few other places where that is permitted. Those accounts of self solve two of the big barriers in healthcare: reduction and isolation. Narratives don’t let us reduce people to their condition (the guy with arthritis). And they force us to stand on the precipice with them.
“To be your doctor, I need to know a lot about your body and your health and your life. What do you think I should know?”

Artists are not afraid of the doubt. They mystery of doubt does not frighten them. They enter it. Not to solve it, but to say it, to represent it, so that the rest of us can experience it. Narratives let us say it, let us reflect it, let us embrace the peril of being alive.
Dr. Rita Charon with a painting from one of the artists who inspires her: Mark Rothko

Meaningful: Why do we generalize our audience so much? Meaningful experiences are specific to a niche of people the brand knows well.
Fidelino: Confidence and easy connections
The healthcare brands that elicit a reflexive response very confidently state what they’re about. They connect very easily with audiences they care about. And, they show it in everything they do. Their communications are:
Authentic: The greatest brands in the world don’t reject their category, they embrace it. Embracing the category grounds people and lets the advertising focus on the nuance.
Immersive experiences: Great brands create a new world and immerse you in an involving experience. It’s what creates that lasting impression and ultimately drives choice.

Great example: Gold-award-winner Mind Your Meds
The Medicine Abuse Project’s goal is to prevent half a million teens from abusing medicines by 2017. It’s a multi-year effort led by The Partnership at Drugfree.org. The campaign aims to help educate parents, teens and the public about the dangers of medicine abuse.

“The cool compel us to engage. They ask us to identify with them and embrace them. And we willing do that. Healthcare needs cool. We need people to gravitate toward it. We want people to engage in it.”
- R. John Fidelino, Executive Creative Director, Interbrand Health

Great example: Silver-award-winner Stryker GetAroundKnee
The GetAroundKnee campaign was designed to get “fence sitters” to talk to their doctors about knee replacement surgery and the GetAroundKnee—the only system designed to replace naturally circular knee motion.
To reach patients, they simplified a complicated message about the product and its “single-radius” design by letting prospective patients know that there are different kinds of knee replacement systems, and that the choice they make ultimately determines the kind of mobility they enjoy post-surgery.

VIPs: Very Informed PatientsThe people who read all the science, follow the news updates, become arm chair experts, and heavily influence their communities.
Peter Matheson Gay, Creative Director at Weber Shandwick

Great example: Gold-award-winner CancerTweets
Cancer is a silent disease, every year millions of people die for ignoring their symptoms. That’s why Cancertweets was created. Its 7 Twitter accounts represented 7 types of cancer and 'spread out' the virtual cancer throughout thousands of accounts. Virtual cancer acted as a real cancer: at first, followed silently. Then, started to manifest subtle; finally expressed its symptoms directly. Those who detected on time, virtual cancer stopped following them. Those who ignored it, received a final message.

We’re on the cusp of so much change. In how technology is changing medicine, how people are engaging in their own health, and what new innovations in treatment are available.
- R. John Fidelino, Executive Creative Director, Interbrand Health

That data was always there. But the way they looked at it changed their view of the world, their possibilities.
A life-extending answer found in every-day data
In May of 2008, Leerom Segal, CEO, Klick Health, learned that his father had been diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. The experts said there was nothing they could do. Second, third, fourth opinions all confirmed it was too late. Then they got a glimmer of hope from online communities. They found a number of people who had been posting for a long time… longer than the prognosis should have allowed.
That led them to quickly audit everyone posting in the communities by the date of their first post. Only 11 names had been posting for over a year. The family made an appeal to those 11 and 9 responded by the next morning. Most were on the same clinical trial.
Using that information, Leerom’s father lived for 3 more years … that was1000 dinners, dozens of family trips.

“Our brains evolved in a world that was linear and local. We don’t live in that world anymore. We live in a world that’s global and exponential.
If you take 30 linear steps, by step 30 you get to 30. But technology evolves exponentially. You take those same 30 steps, but instead of 1, 2, 3, it goes 2, 4, 8, 16. By step 30, you’re at a billion.
That’s why the phone is your pocket is a million times smaller, a million times cheaper, and 1000 times more powerful than computers that used to take up half a building.”
- Jason Silva, futurist
Silva: Most of us aren’t thinking big enough

“In this world, attention is the new limited resource. We need a cognitive shift, a way to inspire a generation to reconceive the possible. We need to define and extend what it means to be human.”
- Jason Silva, futurist

It’s time to marry the greatest challenges of the public sector with the greatest strengths of the private sector. The next era of innovation in healthcare starts there.
- Kathy Calvin, CEO, United Nations Foundations

Great example: Coca Cola Ekocenter
Ekocenter is Coca Cola’s social enterprise system - and one big example of what the industry can do. The system is a “downtown in a box.” Completely self-sufficient community centers that filter water, offer power and connect people to the internet. Coca-cola builds products on top of those centers, like access to phone charging and wifi. But also bigger services that matter where people are gathering – like education and healthcare.

“It is the morning of The Day, full of more seminars, galleries, and then, tonight, the big award ceremony. But what else is Cannes waking up to?
Perhaps the fact that “Healthcare” is not just a judging category, but a central filter for everything we do, buy, and eat (the categories found in the regular Cannes Lions show)?
Is it waking up to the potential and privilege of healthcare creativity to truly change lives versus simply disseminating a differentiating message in a clever way?
As we shake off another night of French cuisine and vin rouge, we have to ask our own selves: Are we waking up, too?”
Bruce Rooke, GSW, Lions Health judge

Students to Healthcare: No thanks.
FCB Health recently surveyed 225 advertising students at 30 different colleges and universities around the country. They asked those students if they’d consider a career in healthcare advertising. 202 said no. The #1 reason why not was they wouldn’t be able to do good work. It’s a perception that's echoed by professors and friends.
What would change their minds? The majority said they’d only consider it if they had no other option. But, interestingly, 35, a small but important number, would consider it because it’s something they can feel good about.

Great example: Silver-award-winner Cialis
Cialis is an erectile dysfunction medication. These reminder ads from Canada are clever, creative ways to show the ultimate benefit: more sex! In this ad (video on click) a mother negotiates a later curfew for her son, much to his confusion. He doesn't realize she’s doing it so she can have more time to have sex with her husband.

This year, there was no Grand Prix awarded for pharmaceutical marketing. Why: We’ve got more work to do.
11.5 hours of judging today. My take: most work fails because it aims too low. It is too easily satisfied just relaying a message, but not wanting to change something, transform an experience, make something happen.
Thinking big in creative execution starts with thinking big on why you’re doing this execution in the first place. Customers (and Lions Health judges!) are too bombarded by messages to pay attention to more of the same. Raise the ambition of your work!
Bruce Rooke, GSW, Lions Health judge